


thermodynamics

by 8611



Series: the study of [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Magic, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, Open Relationships, Scarification, Tattoos, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 12:44:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/735821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 6:04am on a Sunday morning, and Lydia is at his door with coffee and an offer - Europe, witches, and sparks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thermodynamics

**Author's Note:**

> The magic in here comes from two places - the general system I was using in [chromatography](http://archiveofourown.org/works/682414), and the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. What you need to know from that, if you haven't read the books, is that in that canon death is a massive river divided into nine sections, or precincts, with a "gate" (some kind of obstacle) at the end of each one. Dead beings can be controlled with a set of seven bells. If you're curious, check out [here](http://oldkingdomwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Death) and [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bells_\(Old_Kingdom_Series\)). 
> 
> [These](http://8611fic.tumblr.com/image/44317131731) are Stiles' tattoos. 
> 
> A massive thank you to my beta, [spinningdust](http://spinningdust.tumblr.com/), who continues to put up with my inability to understand punctuation. <3

(Lydia comes back from Ireland with her hair chopped short and news from home. 

“Your dad is getting married,” she says as he hauls himself out of the pool, the cool air making the hair on his arms stand on end. 

“He called me,” Stiles says, and looks over Lydia’s shoulder at where Heikki is moving around in the kitchen, brightly lit behind the plate glass wall. 

“You don’t want to leave.”

“We have to eventually.”

Lydia licks her lips and leans in to press a kiss to the bridge of Stiles’ nose, her hands warm against his wet skin as his eyes flutter close. She feels like death, creeping and smoking under her skin, more so than ever before, and when Stiles anchors himself with a palm on her arm, she sighs. 

“Drain it,” he tells her, and they sit on one of the lounges by the pool, in the night-dark, and Lydia rests her hands on his bare chest and uses him as a conduit, fever bright and hard edged, and he lets her let go of all the death in her body, his own feet firmly on the ground. 

(Return to the ground what is buried there.)

In the morning, leaning against Heikki in bed, he books tickets on his phone and Heikki doesn’t comment, just presses a fierce kiss to the curve of Stiles’ shoulder, over the middle of the tattoo there.)

\---

Stiles has not gotten nearly enough sleep for the amount of knocking currently happening at his front door. 

“What in fresh fucking hell,” Stiles groans, flailing an arm out to grab his phone. The cheery, bright letters tell him it’s 6:04am. On Sunday. Sunday is sleep-in day, round Casa Stilinski. 

“It’s Lydia,” Derek says, his voice wrecked and rough from sleep. “Go get rid of her.”

“Yeah, that’s so not happening,” Stiles mutters, disentangling himself from the octopus hold that is Derek’s limbs and rolling of out of bed. “One does not simply ‘get rid of Lydia’.” 

“Whatever. I’m going back to sleep.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and stumbles into a pair of boxers while kicking open his bedroom door, raking a hand through his hair and wondering how insanely not presentable he looks. Then again, Lydia was sleeping with Jackson for a while after he was turned, so she has like absolutely no room to judge the bite marks currently littering Stiles’ shoulder and chest. 

(Over his scars. Derek has a habit of doing that, a growl deep and low in his throat.)

When Stiles opens the door Lydia is in fact standing in the hallway, armed with Starbucks. 

“Uh,” Stiles says, squinting at her. “Not that I don’t love seeing your radiant self at all times, but what exactly are you doing in LA at six in the morning on a Sunday?” 

“I’m going to Europe,” Lydia tells him, pushing past him and setting one of the cups down on the counter, gesturing to it. “That’s for you. I need you present and awake for this.”

“That’s lovely and everything, but that doesn’t answer why you’re _here_ ,” Stiles says, but he does take the coffee and push himself up onto the counter, stooping a bit to fit under the cabinets. 

“You’re coming with me.”

“Sorry, I could have sworn you just said that I’m going to Europe with you.”

“You are. I’m sick of Deaton’s half-truths and werewolf lore. If I’m going to get better at whatever this is,” she gestures to herself, and Stiles takes a long sip of coffee to keep from making a comment, “I’m going to Europe. I’ve found some contacts.”

“I’m not exactly in a place to go running off to Europe. I graduate in three weeks; I have to find a job and do real person things,” Stiles says. “And I’m trying to not get myself in trouble.”

“You have two enchanted daggers in your bag hanging by the door and there’s an arsenal of mountain ash, wolfsbane, and verbena in your closet,” Lydia says, and Stiles rubs the back of his head with a hand, sighing. He’s just being cautious, after years of this shit. “If you don’t want to leave because of Scott --“

“Scott?” Stiles asks, confused, and Lydia points a finger at his shoulder. “Oh, no, not Scott.”

Lydia studies him for a moment, setting down her coffee and crossing her arms. She’s lost any hints of roundness in her face, her wrists, and she looks like the young woman she is, not the girl that Stiles spent years and years trailing after. 

“Please, Stiles,” she says, and just like that, Stiles knows he’s gone. 

\---

There is sun through the blinds, slanting across the expanse of Derek’s back, his face turned towards Stiles and away from the light. Stiles doesn’t particularly want to analyze why, but at this point in his life the current grey-hazel color of Derek’s eyes, dim and human, seems stranger than when they’re glowing red. 

“She wants you to go to Europe,” Derek says, and Stiles reaches out to trail his index finger around the curves of Derek’s tattoo from where he’s sitting near Derek’s hip. 

“Yeah,” Stiles says, watching the movements of his finger. “I don’t know. Who goes gallivanting off to Europe like that?” 

“It must be nice to be stupid rich.”

“ _You’re_ stupid rich.”

“Yeah, but I don’t spend it on witchy trips to Europe.” 

Stiles smiles, flattens out his hand so that his palm hides most of Derek’s tattoo. 

“I’m not even a witch,” Stiles says after a while. 

“You’re something.”

“Yeah, _human_.”

“No, idiot, I know that. Whatever the… spark thing is that you have going on. It’s like human plus.”

“That makes me sound like motor oil or something.”

Derek grins up at Stiles, and Stiles just rolls his eyes. 

“I won’t stop you from going,” Derek says, and his voice is quiet. When Stiles looks down at him he turns his face half into the pillow, letting out a long breath. “We don’t really see a ton of each other anyway.”

“I know,” Stiles murmurs, and lies down to curl around Derek’s side, turning Derek’s face back to him with one hand. “You won’t be happy about me going.”

“Having you five hours away is slightly more convenient than Europe.”

“I don’t mean like that.”

“Stiles, it’s fine. Go to Europe with Lydia, do the whole sparky thing. I know you… I know it bothers you that you can’t always help the pack. Mine or Scott’s. Maybe this will help.”

“Yeah, I don’t think a couple of months in Europe is going to turn me into a badass on par with a pack of crazy alphas.”

Derek sort of half shrugs, the motion strange because he’s lying down, and he reaches out an arm, wrapping it around Stiles and pulling him closer in. 

“Have some faith in yourself.”

“Oh god, are you trying to give me a pep talk? Is this really my life? Am I getting a pep talk from the Angst Bucket himself?” 

Derek growls, and before Stiles is totally sure what’s happening he’s been turned onto his back and Derek has a pillow in his face. Stiles throws his head back, laughing, fighting off Derek’s totally weak pillow attack. 

“You know,” Stiles says, smirking, after he manages to push the pillow away. “Lydia thought I was sleeping with Scott.”

It gets the intended response – Derek’s eyes flash red for the briefest of moments, and Stiles raises his eyebrows, trailing his fingertips down Derek’s chest. 

“Scott might be your alpha, but here?” Derek growls. He scrapes his teeth over the juncture of Stiles’ shoulder and neck, making his toes curl. “You’re mine.” 

Stiles evidently has some weird kink for possessive werewolves. He’d get worried, but then again, he’s too busy having mind-blowing sex with said possessive werewolf to care. 

\---

(Stiles used to not like Derek. He had a begrudging alliance with him, because when push came to shove, one alpha was better than none, and back when Peter was alive they didn’t have Scott as their alpha fallback. 

He’s not sure when he decided to be attracted to Derek instead. Sometime after high school, after dislike had become something neutral, and then something almost friendly, right around the Pool Incident and the party after that. He’d visited one summer and there was Derek, coerced into being a lifeguard at the local pool for the summer by Boyd, and that was that. One minute Stiles was doing laps before the pool got too busy in the morning, and the next he was looking up into the face of a shirtless Derek Hale in rather small swim shorts. 

“Uh, hi,” Stiles says, hovering near the edge of the pool, and Derek bends down to glare at him. “You work here?”

“Favor for Boyd,” Derek says, narrowing his eyes. “It’s only temporary.” 

“You do favors for your betas?” Stiles needs to learn to shut up. 

Derek fixes him with a glare, and then reaches out a hand to shove Stiles underwater. He comes back up sputtering, arms windmilling. 

“Worst lifeguard ever!” Stiles hurls at his retreating back. Derek just places himself in one of those stupidly high chairs and watches Stiles from behind a pair of bad boy aviators, like he thinks he’s some kind of evil overlord.)

\---

It’s June and they’re in Rome, in a hostel that looks out onto a narrow back alley that’s packed with cafes and Vespas. 

The window is open, and the sound of rain comes in with heavy, claustrophobic air. Stiles stands with his hands braced on the sill and breathes in a new city, one that he’s never seen in his life before this morning. 

“I’m not good at this, you know,” Stiles says. “I’m not a witch, just good with stuff that’s got traces of power in it.”

“That makes you something,” Lydia says, looks up at him. “You’ll be fine.”

Stiles doesn’t doubt that. Despite overwhelming odds in favor of him being an emotional disaster, crippled physically and mentally, he’s still (mostly) whole. He rubs a hand at the claw scar on his shoulder, under the thin material of his t-shirt, and remembers red eyes that weren’t the familiar ones, weren’t Derek’s. 

“I think I’ve found someone,” Lydia says two days later, when they’re walking arm in arm down one of the wide, busy streets that snake through the city. “A group of kids in college. They said they’d help us.”

There are nine of them, and they laugh and smile and Stiles is so used to the word witch being neutral - or even evil - in his mind that he’s thrown off guard at first. 

He sits with a girl in a pair of bright green sandals, their backs to the wall of an empty room at their university, and Stiles uses what little Spanish he knows to get across what they can’t figure out in English. It’s broken and uneven, Spanish a poor excuse for Italian, but it’s impossible to mistake the look on her face when he shows her the daggers. 

“These are powerful,” she says. “From you, though.”

That surprises Stiles; he’d always assumed that whatever he was feeling from the daggers was something that had been left there by the previous owner (he’d gotten them from the Argents, after all), but evidently not quite. 

He etches circles into the air with the tip, the shapes glowing for a heartbeat in that bright amber color he associates with his own eyes, the spark in his bones, and she takes his hand, directs the motion of the blade. The shapes she makes in the air look like runes, or symbols. 

“Charter marks,” the girl says, and nods at Lydia. “For her. You will have to watch her, keep her, yeah?” 

He nods, and when Lydia turns to him she’s smiling, and Stiles knows that he’s going to end up following her to the ends of the earth and then over the edge, one day. 

\---

In Spain they meet a man who tells Stiles that he needs to get a staff, tells Stiles that he should go to Turkey, tells Lydia to go to Scotland. Tells them both to go to Finland. 

They go to Turkey first, and they take their time. In Odessa Stiles finds a polearm, something that the guy selling it says is a war scythe, and Stiles doesn’t even question that he needs it. It hums under his hands, perfect and warm. 

Istanbul feels familiar in a way, but not quite. It takes him a few days to realize that it’s werewolves, a pull he hasn’t felt in months. He and Lydia sit on the terrace of a mosque outside one of the markets and watch people go past, searching for the pack they know is there, but they can’t quite find them. It makes something ache in Stiles, something that he knows has to do with Derek.

(He and Lydia have taken to sharing a bed, wrapped around each other, but some mornings he’s still thrown off to wake up to Lydia’s body, not Derek’s.)

“Probably for the best,” Lydia says. “They told me, in Rome, that we carry the signature of wolves.”

“It’ll fade,” Stiles says. “I mean, hopefully.”

“I don’t know.”

They leave, head down the coast. In Iznik, on the beach, a woman comes up to them, her hair done up in a braid, pulled back sharply from her face. 

“You’re Stiles?” she asks, and when he sits up from the sand and nods, she smiles down at him, offers a hand. “I’m Emel. I hear you need a weapons instructor.” 

Stiles comes back to the little apartment they’re renting on the beach bruised every day, but smiling, and he doesn’t miss the way Lydia watches him out of the corner of her eye. One night Lydia strips him of his shirt and traces the bruises with long fingers, her nails painted an orangey-red, the same color as the sparks of her magic. 

(It’s innate with her, will cascade down her hair, vanish into the air around her.)

Lydia kisses him, and he feels fire in her skin, and he pulls her apart with his hands and his mouth, and in the morning, he feels Lydia more than he ever has in his life. He’s aware of her, the smells on her skin, the flicker of flame that she keeps tight in her hands. 

“Who was it?” Lydia asks. “The werewolf you were sleeping with.”

“It _is_ Derek,” Stiles says, and Lydia tilts her head, looks at him curiously from where she’s sitting against the headboard. Stiles realizes that Lydia must think he’s cheating on Derek, which is so ridiculous he nearly starts laughing. 

(Whatever he and Derek have, it’s not a relationship; they’re not dating, because they know that that’s not a luxury they have, don’t have anything besides stolen weekends to fuck their way through, never had a chance at a normal life.)

“He knows what it’s like to have a pack,” Lydia says eventually, because she never lets a problem, algorithm, theorem get past her without working it out. “What it means for the individuals in the pack.” 

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “He does.” 

He traces those marks from Rome into her skin that night, after they’ve just spent a day exploring the city, and when she looks down at them and then back up at him she rolls him over and whispers a story into his ear: nine gates, an endless river, and stars.

\---

Lydia goes to Scotland and Stiles stays, and Emel remolds him. He uses the staff like a lacrosse stick when he first starts using it, and she smiles and shakes her head, moves his hands, culls his strikes into something less wild. 

“You’re divided,” she tells him one day, when she’s just spun into his personal space and slammed him under the chin with the broad side of her staff. He groans, forcing himself into a sitting position on the ground, and looks up at her. 

“You have a twin,” Stiles says, as his vision swims. “You’re both very pretty.”

“Don’t pass out on me.”

“Nah, wouldn’t dream of it.”

She helps him up with a hand, like she had on the beach that first day. 

“Try to be less Stiles and a spark, but Stiles _with_ a spark.”

It’s harder than she makes it sound, and it takes Stiles almost two months before something finally clicks, and instead of moving against his own body and the air, everything comes together and the blow he slams down onto Emel’s staff comes with a gust of wind that moves with him, across his back and down his arms, and forces her back further than it should have.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she says, looking pleased. “Do that again.”

He’s not sure how he did it, but he tries again and again until he can replicate it on command, pulling the air around him with his body, and his strikes become less wild and more about direction and power. 

\---

“I’ll see you in Finland,” Emel tells him when she drops him off at the airport.

“What’s up with Finland?” Stiles asks. 

“There’s a very old coven there. They tend to take in newbies.”

That doesn’t sit well with Stiles. He’s got a pack already, and he’s got Lydia, and he doesn’t feel like he’s in need of a coven. 

When he touches down in London there’s a text message from Lydia:

_Ireland._

Changing his ticket is a pain in the ass, but there are three guys waiting for him at the airport, hulking and scarred, and Stiles assumes that Lydia has lost her mind and joined a rugby team.

He’s not expecting them to _actually_ be part of a rugby team.

“Recreational,” one of the guys says, in the car, once they’re headed vaguely north-west, by Stiles’ reckoning. “We’re pretty decent.”

“I don’t know how to play,” Stiles admits, and then spends the rest of the ride having all of rugby dumped into his brain by three witches-cum-rugby players. He feels slightly dizzy when he finally gets out of the car in a tiny town in the middle of rolling green hills, the high street seemingly made of pubs and pubs only. 

Lydia is sitting at a table in one of the pubs with more rugby-looking types, laughing, and when she turns to Stiles he’s hit by a wall of something dark and powerful, something that he’s not sure he likes the feel of. 

They’re standing outside later, he and Lydia, and she tells him. 

“It’s death.”

“Huh?”

“I can see your skin crawling from here,” she says, turns to him. “It’s death.”

“What, are you a zombie now?”

“No, that’s stupid. Did Emel knock your brain out?”

“Nearly, a few times.”

“Sad, considering you didn’t have much of one to begin with.”

“Love you too, Lyds.”

She grins over at him, something pretty and perfect and yet disturbingly lethal, and she takes his hands between hers. 

“You should know better than most people than death is a pretty flimsy barrier,” Lydia says. Stiles thinks of Peter, and of Lydia’s story from Iznik, and nods. “You can walk into it, if you know how.”

“That’s… yeah. I’m not gonna do that.”

“You don’t have to, but you could. You know it just as well as I do.”

Stiles doesn’t like the sound of that, and he looks away, licks his lips. 

Lydia traces the base of his spine in bed, twisting her finger over the vertebrae in the dip of his back. 

“You’re more powerful than you give yourself credit for,” she says. “It’s in here.”

“What, my back?”

“Yes, actually. Power rests in bones, and this,” she drags a finger down his spine, makes him shiver, “is unbroken.”

When they meet the guy in charge of the rugby coven (Stiles is never going to get over that), he says something similar, looking at Stiles from under insanely bushy, grey eyebrows. 

“You have some serious power there, lad.”

“Yeah, so people keep telling me.”

“I can help.”

This is how Stiles finds himself face down on one of the tables in the pub that by now he knows the coven owns, one night when the locals are gone and it’s just him and Gareth, the leader. 

“This is going to hurt,” Gareth says, and Stiles just nods in the dim light. He knows.

Stiles manages to not scream when Gareth cuts the first circle, perfectly centered over his spine on his lower back. The second one does get a scream out of him, and by the third one he’s not making any noise, but his eyes are wet and he’s clawing at the wood of the tabletop.

He doesn’t move though. He anchors himself with the air around them, pulls it tight against him, and presses his forehead to the cool wood. 

“Woad,” Gareth tells him, holding up a jar of powder ink, “and birch bark ash.”

 _Derek said I smelled like birch, once_ , Stiles thinks as Gareth rubs the powder into three bloody circles, and somehow, even though he know it hurts even worse, it also grounds him. 

He’d said that Stiles’ fingers always smelled like mountain ash, that it didn’t wash out, but that under it all he smelled like birch, and the sky. 

\---

(Stiles had ended up at a party one night, one summer, that summer when Derek was at the pool, which Derek happened to be at. It was a strange mix of college kids and those that had just graduated, and evidently a) Derek knew other people besides the pack, b) sometimes those people invited him to parties. 

“Hey, worst lifeguard ever, how’s it hanging?” Stiles asks, leaning on Derek, and Derek shuffles under him, but doesn’t move, just stays looking straight ahead. Stiles smiles, transferring his beer to his other hand so that he can place a palm over Derek’s chest. “Just so you don’t judge me for this, _totes_ drunk. You have a magnifique chest.” 

“That’s not a real word.”

“It’s French, asshole.”

“Magnifique,” Derek says, correcting his pronunciation, and Stiles knows he’s gone, because evidently Derek speaks French or some other shit, and evidently drunk Stiles likes burly werewolves who speak French. 

They’d ended up sitting on a swing under one of the trees in the yard, the party going on around them, and somehow the topic of scent had come up, so of course Stiles was going to ask. 

“What about me?” Stiles asks, looking up at Derek from where he’s got his head in the dude’s lap, because there is way too much alcohol in his person to worry about doing silly things like sitting up. “Do I smell like… uh. Roses… or something. Daisies?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Derek says, glaring out at the party in general. 

“Tell meeeee,” Stiles wheedles, flailing a hand up to hit Derek in the chest. Derek catches Stiles’ hand with a sigh, dropping it onto Stiles’ face. “Oof, fuck off, douchebag.” 

“You’re the one in my lap.”

“Your thighs are comfortable. What do I smell like?”

“Stiles.”

“That’s not a smell!”

“No, you smell like Stiles.”

“I hate you.”

It took until Stiles had basically fallen asleep in Derek’s lap, hovering somewhere between awake and sleep, the lights of the party curling around in his memory. He thinks Derek might have put a hand in his hair, running fingers through it, but what he does remember for sure is Derek finally answering his question. 

“Your fingers smell like mountain ash, that never washes out. It’ll be with you forever. But you smell like birch, and an open sky before a storm.”)

\---

Sam, the guy in charge of weapons for the coven, is somewhat of a more daunting opponent than Emel. Emel is fast, deadly quick, but Emel also isn’t about 350 pounds and 6’5”. 

“I feel like I might die,” Stiles says. “Like, I’m pretty sure you could crush me under your thumb.”

“Gentle giant, I promise,” Sam says, but then disproves that when Stiles finds himself on his back a few seconds later. 

“Yep, totally going to die,” Stiles wheezes, and Sam laughs, hauls him back up by his arm, and they start again. 

Every day the movements pull at his skin less and less, and eventually when Stiles looks over his shoulder at his back in the mirror the three circles are starting to fade to dark blue-grey scars, almost black behind the new, red skin. 

He’s not sure if they’ve done anything, but the marks are calming in a way, and Lydia says that they feel like power, but other than that, they feel like him, and that’s important. 

She shows him how to drain emotion and power one day, and he just shakes his head, knows instinctively that he’ll never do that, but that he can help Lydia with it.

“Use me,” Stiles says, and she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, almost afraid for a moment. But Lydia doesn’t show fear, even if she feels it, not anymore, not since Jackson, and so she locks her hands around Stiles’ upper arms and lets everything flood out.

This is death, this river, these gates, the currents, the shadows, and the dead that dance and trudge through the water. He knows now, knows the misty air, the cool water, the way sound travels, the thunder of a waterfall, and the way that, beyond the last gate, there are stars in a night sky that Lydia won’t look at until one day she has to, but that day is a long time off. 

When they surface Stiles is shaking like a leaf, and Lydia’s hands are cold on his shoulders. When he breaths out he realizes that he’s the one causing the cold, that he’s actually made the air around them icy. When he laughs his breath is steam, and Lydia rolls her eyes, but she still leans into the cold to kiss him, and her lips are so, so warm. 

“See,” she says, when she pulls away. “You can do things on your own.”

“That wasn’t on my own,” Stiles says. “Using all of death isn’t being unarmed.” 

It takes him a long time to fall asleep that night, shadows in his mind, and it’s only when Lydia shifts, her fingers slipping over his tattoos, that something untangles in his chest and he can close his eyes and not see nightmares behind his eyelids. 

\---

The coven in Finland is huge, over forty people, and Stiles sticks to Lydia like glue when they first meet all of them, at a gorgeous modern house, all metal and glass and smooth wood. They’re from all over the globe, and Stiles finds out that their history goes back hundreds of years. Evidently not even hunters felt like chasing witches all the way up into central Scandinavia. 

People slip off after the meeting, but Stiles and Lydia have been offered rooms in the house, so they stay. Stiles wanders, trailing his fingers along the whitewashed walls and getting a feeling for the space inside the house, wide and open. 

There’s a library in one corner, and Stiles finds a section on weapons, everything you could possible ever want to know, books by academics, run of the mill authors, witches, hunters. One is about prehistoric weapons, and Stiles sits on the ground and flips through the pages, stopping on one that shows an ornate, round shield. He rubs a thumb around the edges of the picture, gets a feeling for it, and it sticks with him for some reason. 

“You must be Stiles.”

Stiles nearly jumps out of his skin, startling so hard that he’s up and in a defensive position before he realizes it, hand already going for the knife he’d tucked into his boot that morning. He stops when he realizes the man standing a few feet from him was at the meeting, is part of the coven. He relaxes his posture, standing up straight. 

“Uh, sorry,” Stiles says, shifts from one foot to the other. The man is tall and thin, with muted brown hair and dark eyes, and he just smiles softly, doesn’t speak. He comes over to Stiles and bends down to pick up the book, shuffling through the pages. 

“Bronze age,” the man says. “Always interesting. Emel said you liked this weapons kit.”

“I –- my daggers are reproductions, they’re modern,” Stiles says, because he knows the wide blades are ancient in design, but the ones he carries had only been made for the Argents back in the 50s. 

“I think they might be cast from ancient molds,” the man says. “I have a bit of a mind for old stone.”

“I’m sorry – I don’t know your name.”

“Heikki.”

That explains it. The girl who had picked them up and brought them here had been babbling on about the architect of the house, that _Heikki knows what he’s doing with building material_. 

“I didn’t mean to freak out,” Stiles says. “I’m just kind of… I’m twitchy.”

“You were sitting still until I scared you. It’s my fault.”

“Trust me, it’s so far from your fault that I’m twitchy.” 

Heikki just grins at him, and hands the book back. 

“Good night, Mr. Stilinski,” Heikki says, and leaves Stiles standing in the dark library, wondering why he still feels so unbalanced. 

\---

Stiles is glad to be back somewhere with a steady internet connection, because when he finally gets a chance to Skype with Scott, he can’t help the smile on his face. 

“Yo, you’re alive!” Scott says, and he’s grinning. 

“Just barely, I got my ass kicked into next Tuesday by a rugby witch.”

“A… rugby witch?”

“I am never going to get over this, Scott. They’re a rugby team, right? But they’re also a coven. All these giant, beat-up dudes who are so old school that they sit around in circles with flower offerings. They are my actual favorite.” 

“Please tell me there are photos.”

“Of course there are photos; this needs to be preserved for all of history. I’ll totally post them on Facebook, I have a decent connection again.”

It’s easy to slip back into just being _Stiles_ with Scott. Not a spark, not a witch, not anything but his old self, in too big hoodies and scuffed up sneakers. He missed this. 

“Hey, lemme see your tattoo,” Scott says, because Stiles had emailed him about that. 

“Oh yeah, hold on.” Stiles pulls his shirt off and turns around, hears Scott suck in a quick breath. 

“Jesus, that must have hurt like a bitch.”

“More than,” Stiles says, looking over his shoulder at Scott. “Worth it, though.”

Scott talks about home, and Allison, and Stiles just listens to the roll and rhythm of his voice, and remembers what Beacon Hills is like.

\---

“Do you guys have a tattoo artist?” Stiles asks, drumming his fingers on the countertop. Outside the wall of windows in the kitchen the world is grey and raining, and Stiles has nervous energy all the way down to his fingertips. It’s been a long time since he’s gone this long without working out or training. 

“Of course,” Heikki says. “Most large covens will.”

“What’s with you guys and tattoos? I never see anyone with them.”

“Most keep them hidden.”

Stiles knows writing your story on your skin is dangerous, but he figures if you’re going to do it, do it. Don’t hide them away under magic.

The shield comes first, with Stiles sitting at the table in the library, feet kicked up on the tabletop. The woman who does it has small palms but long fingers, and as she wipes away blood and ink that bubbles to the surface, Stiles watches those fingers. It hurts, the needle buzzing directly over his shoulder joint, but not like before. He knows that nothing will hurt like that, not unless he gets something else done in that way. 

“You’ll need a full kit,” Heikki says, and Stiles knows, because he was already thinking about that.

In the real world, not the one that Stiles is forming on his skin in woad and birch, Heikki finds him a quarterstaff to practice with from a warehouse the coven use for storage. He was able to bring his daggers by checking them, but there was no way to get a war scythe on a plane, so it had been left with Emel. 

In a way, Stiles misses it, and he’s happy to have a staff back under his hands. 

On the mornings when the weather is nice Stiles will slip out of bed before Lydia and move through patterns, movements, strikes, and think of Emel’s voice, guiding him. 

(He doesn’t have to think of her voice when she actually drops by for a week, and spars with Stiles in the garden. She tells him his form has improved, and when he manages to execute a move that includes dropping his staff and grabbing his daggers from the back holster that Heikki had found for him before flipping them around in one smooth motion, she looks proud.)

Sometimes Heikki will come out and sit on the steps of the patio and watch Stiles. Aside from the occasional person, Stiles hasn’t seen much of the coven. Lydia leaves in the morning to go work with one of them, but they don’t seem to come to Heikki’s much. 

“It’s not my house,” Heikki says one day when Stiles points it out, when Stiles is laid out on the library table again. The woman with the long fingers (Marie, her name is Marie; Stiles keeps the names of these people close) is working on putting one of his daggers on his back, under the thin line that wraps around the back of his neck, over his shoulders, and comes to rest just above his collarbones. 

Every time he feels pain, he thinks of the wood of the table in Gareth’s pub and feels warmth up his spine, something to take the pain away. 

“Sorry?”

“I designed it, but I don’t own it. I just stay here.”

“Close enough.”

Heikki smiles, eyes sharp, his eyes are always sharp, always watching Stiles. 

“What else are you planning on doing?” Marie asks, helping Stiles to sit up. 

“I’m not sure,” Stiles says, surprised at how easy it is to lie now - he knows exactly. He’s been researching every night in the library, going through the books on weapons, and history, and a time before there was writing, but he’s not done yet. He’ll tell Marie when he has everything planned out, when he’s sure of the power he’s inking into his skin.

(And there’s one thing, something that he has to go back to Gareth for.)

\---

“I have to go back to Ireland,” Lydia says one day, standing in the middle of the room and looking just a little bit lost. 

“Why?”

“I –- something’s not right,” Lydia says, tugging at her hair, taking it out of the bun she had swept it up in that morning. “I slipped the other day, and the current got me and… I hate this. I hate all of it. I’m so used to things making sense, and this doesn’t. There’s no formula for death.” 

“You seem ok,” Stiles says, and holds out a hand, draws her in, fingers laced together. She bends over, kissing him, and it’s rough and heavy, the way she kisses when she’s undone. 

“I know I’m missing something,” Lydia breathes, and Stiles nods, knows that, knows because Lydia is buzzing across her skin and into his. 

“I’m coming with you,” he says, and Lydia just kisses him again, like she expected him to say that. 

She pushes him back, straddling his hips, and he lets her do whatever she needs, lets her take, lets her brace her hands on his chest and sink down onto him, curling her fingers, nails scraping across the skin over his sternum. 

In the morning Heikki finds him as always, sits on the patio with a mug of coffee and the paper and when Stiles finally finishes, Heikki gets up, crosses the lawn, and gently touches the skin just above his elbow with two fingers. 

Heikki’s never touched him before, and the moment he does Stiles finds himself more grounded that he’s ever been before, and he’s aware of the earth below his feet, the tree over their heads, every blade of grass that’s around them. 

“I’ve never--“ Stiles starts, closes his eyes and takes in a depth breath, flooding his lungs with air that’s tinged with something wet and earthy, and the muted smell of cut stone. “I’ve never met someone who uses the earth. I mean, I might have, but they never told me --“

“Before I do this,” Heikki interrupts. “You and Lydia?”

“What about us?”

“Will she mind if I kiss you?”

Stiles is thrown for a moment, unsure of what to do, and not because of Lydia. He knows that Lydia won’t mind; what he and Lydia get up to behind closed doors isn’t what extends to the rest of their lives. They’re pack, twisted together. He thinks of Derek, though, and then of the earth around them, of the way he’s been feeling like he’s drifting in the current that Lydia knows better than he ever will. 

So he grounds himself, and reaches for Heikki. He has to tip his head back – Heikki has a couple of inches on him – but the feeling of everything around him is what he’s been missing. He’s tied to Lydia, but not to the world around her. She burns too bright.

Something in Stiles’ mind reminds him that this won’t last but, but he ignores it and focuses on Heikki’s lips under his. 

That night Marie is there, and Stiles finishes what he started with her, one spot left for something that she can’t do. 

\---

They leave a few days later, but Stiles knows that they’ll be back. He won’t stay long; he knows what he has to do. 

Gareth is totally unsurprised to see them, and even more unsurprised to hear that Stiles wants something from him. 

He still does make a little noise at the back of his throat when Stiles pulls off his sweater though, sitting on one of the tables, feet planted on a chair. 

“Fine work,” Gareth says, tapping the center point of the shield, bending to stare at the deer over Stiles’ ribs. “This was in Finland?”

“Yeah, the coven up there has an artist.”

“I like that,” Gareth says, distracted and already far away, puttering around. “The moon?”

“Yeah, the phases, around the back of the shield.”

“I take it this is for your pack.”

Stiles looks up at him sharply, finds Gareth staring back at him. He and Lydia have played that close to their chests, never mentioning that they’re tied to a pack of werewolves, as loose as those ties might be. They’re still human, always will be. 

“How do you know?” Stiles asks as Gareth comes back. He unrolls a bundle across the table surface, one that Stiles had seen months prior. The sharp, dark blades glint in the low light. 

“Mountain ash and wolfsbane,” Gareth says. “I know flora better than most people ever will, and those don’t wash out. I thought you were a hunter, the first time I saw your daggers, but I think it’s something else. You’re pack for someone.”

“Not really,” Stiles hedges. He doesn’t particularly feel like giving up that he’s linked to two packs, tethered to two different alphas. 

“This says otherwise,” Gareth says, tapping the slice of skin around the bottom of the shield where the moon phases are going to go. “Lie down.”

Stiles knows how to deal with the pain this time, and the little slivers and circles of moon are smaller than the marks over his spine anyway. He rests his head on his crossed arms and breathes in and out slowly, pulling on the air around him, drawing from the pain that sparks every time Gareth makes a cut. The rough burn of the woad and ash is familiar, and Stiles settles into it, lets it hold him. 

“You’re better at this than most people,” Gareth says. “Werewolves must make for hard living.”

Stiles knows that Gareth is staring at the scar across one shoulder, not too far from the circular one left around the same shoulder from being hauled up by a rope. He remembers the burning as the rope had torn open his skin, remembers trying to cling to it so that it didn’t pull his arm out of its socket. 

(Remembers Allison putting an arrow through her grandfather’s skull, or what was left of him, this crippled, half monster who bled black.)

“Werewolves are easy compared to hunters,” Stiles says, and Gareth gives him a long, hard look. 

“You live in pain, Stiles,” Gareth says finally. “I wouldn’t advise it.”

“I try not to,” Stiles says. “It seems to follow me around.”

“You came calling this time,” Gareth says, and there is blood on the blade in his hand, blood on the rag on the table. 

Stiles swallows and shrugs, the motion pulling at fresh cut skin on his shoulder, and thinks of home.

\---

His dad calls him two weeks after he gets back to Finland. 

“Hey, kiddo, long time no talk,” he says, and Stiles curls up in bed, the phone tucked between the mattress and his ear, and wraps himself up in the warmth in his father’s voice. 

“I’m sorry about that,” Stiles says. “I was in Ireland, and I’ve got a Finnish number right now. I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on phone calls.” 

“It’s alright, I understand,” he says, and Stiles wonders if he really does. 

“I –- you don’t.” The words are out of Stiles’ mouth before he can stop them. 

“Sorry?”

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut, takes a deep breath. He needs to do this now, needs to link himself back to home, because right now he’s got threads that go nowhere, no harbor. 

“You know about Derek,” Stiles starts, “right?” 

“What, about the werewolf thing?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how to -- just, there are other things out there besides werewolves.”

“Are you trying to come out? Because you already did that.”

Stiles is suddenly laughing, he can’t help it. He remembers that conversation, his senior year of high school, a conversation that ended with his dad being totally fine about his not straight-ness, but somehow couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Stiles liked someone besides Lydia. 

(Derek. It had been Derek he’d been thinking of during that conversation, something that he hadn’t told his father, only referred to him as _this guy_.)

“Sort of,” Stiles says, grinning. “Here, lemme do this properly: Dad, I’m a witch.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line for so long that Stiles is afraid that the call has been dropped, or he’s run out of credit. 

“Is this why you have a bunch of weird herbs in your room?”

“Oh my god, Dad, they’re not herbs –- I don’t cook with them! They’re powders and extracts used for –- they’re not for cooking.”

“You’re serious.”

“Totally and utterly.”

“Well, you totally took the wind out of my announcement.”

“Oh shit, I’m sorry, you called me –-“

“Stiles, it’s fine. This is good to know. I’m going to panic about this all and have a freak-out in about an hour, but right now it’s fine. Melissa and I are getting married.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles says, shooting upright into a sitting position. “Holy fuck – er, sorry – that is so awesome! Why didn’t you tell me you were going to propose?”

“You were in Ireland.”

“Right, right. God, I am so sorry, about everything, Dad, you have no idea. I wasn’t there for any of this and just, man. I am the actual worst kid ever.”

“You can’t be the worst in all of history. Maybe only third worst.”

“I love you too,” Stiles says, resting his head on his hand and grinning. “Congratulations, Dad, this is truly awesome, I mean it. I wish I was there right now.” 

“You sound homesick.”

There it is.

“I –- I am,” Stiles says, voice small. 

“Come home, Stiles,” his dad says, and Stiles is suddenly exhausted.

“I’m going to,” Stiles promises.

\---

(The first time they end up coming together it’s pouring rain and they’re surrounded by blood, mud, and four dead hellhounds. Allison is kneeling in the mud by Scott, a hand on his forehead and the other on his wrist, murmuring something to him that’s lost in the drum of the rain as he heals. 

Derek wouldn’t have even been here, but he’d been doing research with Stiles when Allison had called, needing help. 

There’s blood dripping off of the end of Stiles’ axe and soaking through his hoodie where he’s ripped open his stitches from last week, when one of these fuckers had opened up his side from hip to ribs. 

“You’re bleeding,” Derek says, crossing to Stiles, pulling up his hoodie before Stiles can stop him, claws still extended and blood up to his elbows. 

“Shit, Melissa is going to kill me,” Stiles says, staring skyward, letting the rain run the blood splatters off his face. 

“I’ll fix it,” Scott groans from a few feet away, pushing himself up onto his elbows. His shirt is in tatters, but all of his organs and ribs appear to be back under skin that’s knitting itself together. “Or, you know, Deaton can. I should probably go see him anyway.”

Allison helps Scott up, moving towards where the Jeep is parked half off the road, a hundred feet away across wet forest. When Stiles moves to go after him Derek stops him with a hand on his wrist, and when Stiles turns around his eyes are fierce, sharp, blood red. 

“You need to take care of yourself,” Derek growls. 

“Scott needed help,” Stiles says, tugging his wrist out of Derek’s grasp. 

“You don’t owe Scott anything-“

“He’s my _alpha_ and my best fucking friend, Derek. I owe him everything.”

“If you die, Stiles, you’re _dead_. That’s it. No super healing. No fix it. I have to bite you if you -– just. Stop.”

“Not happening,” Stiles says, taps the flat of the axe against a muddy sneaker, and when he looks back up at Derek he holds his gaze, doesn’t flinch away. “I help my pack.”

Derek growls again, gets into Stiles’ personal space, and cradles his chin, pressing their foreheads together. Stiles lets out a long breath, drops the axe, and holds Derek’s wrists with sore hands. He’s probably broken a few fingers.

“You have to stop putting yourself in trouble,” Derek says.

“Then Beacon Hills needs to stop being a hellmouth,” Stiles says. 

A week later Derek comes through his window and kisses Stiles, and Stiles whispers things into the kiss that Derek needs to hear, because Stiles knows that Derek knows them, but that he’ll never voice them. 

_We’re going to get hurt, we don’t have this luxury, too many people want to wreck us, this is dangerous._

Derek just nods, but he still fucks Stiles, slow and rolling and conscious of Stiles’ re-stitched side, and kisses promises back into Stiles’ skin, over his scars from Peter and Gerard and the alpha pack, all ripped and tied up together over and around his right shoulder. 

_Here, right here, in this space, it’s only us, nothing can happen to us right now, nothing matters until we get up and leave this room._ )

\---

Lydia comes back from Ireland with cropped hair, news that Stiles already knows, and a package. 

“This is what you were missing,” Stiles realizes as she unwraps it, revealing seven bells. Each one is silver with a mahogany handle, and they’re gorgeous, perfect things. They don’t resonate as particularly good or bad, the energy they give off is just power, tight and coiled. 

“Yeah,” Lydia says, and she picks the smallest one up, handing it over. Stiles runs his hands around the edge, and somehow instinctively knows not to ring it. The seven marks he’d learned in Rome come back to him, murky memories that seem like they’re from a lifetime ago. 

“Ranna,” Stiles says, remember the names the girl had said. “The sleeper.”

Lydia looks at him curiously, eyes narrowed. 

“How do you know that?”

“In Rome, one of the girls in the coven gave me seven charter marks to memorize, told me that I’d need them for you one day. I –- that first time we slept together --” 

Lydia raises a hand, and slowly draws a circle in the air, her own spark a deep orange-red, not too far off from her hair, and then puts a waved line through the middle, a river across the curve of the world. 

Without thinking Stiles raises his hands to mirror hers, and they work through them together, all seven. The marks hang in the air longer than if just Stiles or Lydia had made them, the bright orange color caught between their yellow and red. 

“It’s been a long time since anyone used bells,” Lydia says. “They’re not very… fashionable anymore.”

“I have a feeling you can start your own fashion.”

“Of course I can,” Lydia says, and the smirk she gives Stiles reminds him of high school, early on, before Scott was bitten or any of this started, when they were just human, and _kids_. 

“Are you ok to leave?” Stiles asks after the bells have been carefully packed up. 

“Yeah,” Lydia says. “I actually miss home, how weird is that?” 

“Not weird.”

“And you’re ok to leave Heikki?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, sighs. “Yeah, I am. I think we both knew this was just a… thing.”

“Most relationships are,” Lydia says, and Stiles knows she’s thinking about Jackson, about the one thing that Lydia likes to lie to herself about. 

(Stiles knows sometimes it’s easier to lie to yourself than everyone else. The longer you lie the closer to the truth it gets, and then you don’t have to lie to anyone.)

“Most,” Stiles says, stares off out the window, and when he looks back Lydia is staring at him. 

“You feel like wolf. I can still sense it on you,” she says, and Stiles licks his lips, nods, knows that he’s probably been ignoring that for a long time. 

\---

Beacon Hills is the same way they left it, more than a year ago. Stiles knows that logistically a year isn’t an incredibly long time, but a year ago he was a stick, all the muscle from lacrosse stripped off in favor of sitting around studying, and armed with just a pair of daggers and some wolfsbane. 

He wonders what they look like; Lydia dressed like she’s from Paris (and, in fact, Stiles recognizes the wedges she’s wearing as something she did buy in Paris, when they’d been there for a few weeks), and Stiles with his tattoos peeking out from under one sleeve, his half-shaved hair hidden under a loose beanie. Whoever Stiles and Lydia were a year ago, those people are gone, molded and twisted into something new. 

His dad is waiting in arrivals for them, and Stiles is pretty sure that he’s never received a more crushing hug in his life. Not that he’s going to complain.

“I missed you, kiddo,” his dad says.

“You too,” Stiles says, grinning, and sees Lydia roll her eyes. 

His dad and Lydia make small talk on the way home while Stiles sits in the back and stares out the window, his feet braced on the center console, drumming his fingers absentmindedly on his legs. 

Lydia gets dropped off at her parents’, and it’s only when Stiles is shouldering his duffle from the back of his dad’s truck that he finally brings up what Stiles has been waiting for him to since they got off the plane. 

“So,” his dad says, raising an eyebrow. “Does the tattoo have to do with this whole witch deal?”

“I really hate that word, it’s so hokey, ” Stiles says. “And, um. Tattoo _s_.”

When he turns around his dad has his arms crossed, and is looking slightly like he wants to go find the BBQ grill brush and attempt to scrub the tattoos off of Stiles’ skin. 

(This is not completely unfounded; his dad had actually threated Stiles with just that in the event of tattoos or “strange” piercings, as he termed them, back in high school.)

“Well,” his dad sighs. “You’re an adult. You can mess up your own skin and future hope of ever finding a job.”

“Hey now, I am still incredibly employable as a rock god or Hell’s Angel.”

“Just what I always wanted for my only child.”

It feels strange being back in a house that he associates with his childhood. He’d moved into an apartment after his freshman year and only visited for the summers, so at this point he’s been gone for five years. Everything is exactly how he left it, and it makes him rub at the back of his neck, standing in the middle of his room awkwardly. 

His dad finds him eventually, and watches as Stiles putters around, leaning in the doorway. 

“I moved out of my parents’ when I was 18,” his dad says. “I know.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, licking his lips and checking his phone. “Do you want to go out and get dinner? Like, properly catch up? Also, I really need Mexican food. You have no idea how impossible it is to find anywhere in Europe.”

“Going through withdrawal?”

“The cov -- this rugby team in Ireland found us a burrito place in Dublin last month. I _cried_ , Dad. Over burritos. It was pathetic.” 

His dad grins, and Stiles feels a little more like he’s _home_. 

“Yeah, let’s go get burritos,” his dad says, and Stiles knows he’s home when his dad tosses him the Jeep’s keys from the bowl by the front door. 

\---

After spending a year together, Stiles assumed that he and Lydia would be sick of each other. 

Instead, she’s there the next morning, saying hi to his dad on his way out, and they end up laid out on the floor of Stiles’ room. 

“I have to talk to Derek,” Stiles says.

“I thought you kept in contact with him while you were gone.”

“Yeah, I did, we emailed, but… I don’t know, Lyds.”

“You’ve been kind of wrecked on him since roughly your senior year of high school.”

“Huh?” Stiles turns onto his side towards her, frowning. 

“You know the lost puppy act you’ve pulled with me since grade school?”

“ _Lost puppy_?”

“You did that with him for a while, and then midway through college you just kind of relaxed into something, which I now guess is when you two started sleeping together. By the way, the pining? Not attractive.”

“Your total boner for my hot bod says otherwise,” Stiles mutters, turning onto his back and crossing his arms. 

“Yeah, see, the great thing is that you finally stopped the pining thing and grew up. Which, by the way, I am insanely glad you did, because you’ve turned out to be a surprisingly awesome lay.”

“Oh my god, Lydia,” Stiles says, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “You used to be so prim and proper. What happened?”

“Rugby players,” Lydia says, voice and smile bright when he looks over at her. “So go talk to Derek.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Stiles murmurs, and this time it’s Lydia who moves, pushing herself up to loom over him, her hair falling to curl around Stiles’ shoulder. 

“You’re not going to. Pack, remember?” 

“I think we’re supposed to be a coven.”

“I hate that word, it sounds so ‘lame goth girls under the bleachers’. We’re pack. Much better, bloodthirsty werewolves, insane lizard boys, etc.” 

“All the good stuff,” Stiles laughs. 

“Of course,” Lydia says, and Stiles pushes himself up to kiss her, tangle a hand in her hair, and when they end up pressed together, skin on skin, Stiles can feel the sparks dancing in her hair. 

He remembers once being afraid that he’d end up following Lydia off the edge of the world. Now he knows - is totally sure - that he’d follow her past the ninth gate, and he wouldn’t look back. 

\---

Derek’s loft building, which just used to be him and a few other shut-in types with too much money, has been taken over. Stiles gets out of the Jeep and into a parking lot that is a sea of Priuses and Leafs, and as he locks the car up he watches a woman in cuffed overalls haul several reusable hemp shopping bags and a toddler in Toms out of her car. 

Hipsters have evidently infiltrated. Stiles figures it was probably coming; they’re close enough to San Francisco to qualify for the ‘quaint bedroom community’ title, especially now that the commuter train had been extended a few years back. Still, Stiles gets a kick out of the fact that they’ve moved out here with their organic food and free trade shoes (Stiles has no idea if shoes can actually be free trade), getting away from the big city, only to settle down in a community that might as well be the reincarnation of Sunnydale. 

When he knocks on Derek’s door it actually takes a couple of minutes for Derek to show up, and when he finally does he’s looking very human - bleary and sleepy, hair stuck up and flattened on one side of his head. 

“Oh shit,” Stiles says, making a few connections, because he’s been living with a life full of werewolves for almost 10 years, “last night was the full moon, you know what, I’m gonna go and let you –-“

“It’s fine,” Derek says, voice rough, and opens the door wide enough for Stiles to slip under his arm. 

The loft is pretty much exactly how Stiles had left it a year ago, although the TV looks to have gotten bigger and sleeker, and someone has installed an Xbox under it. Stiles can’t really imagine Derek playing something like Left 4 Dead, so he’s willing to bet Isaac had something to do with that. 

Derek drifts off towards his bedroom, and Stiles stands there awkwardly until Derek looks back over at him, one eyebrow raised, a foot on the spiral staircase. 

“I’m not talking until I’ve slept more,” Derek says, and then heads upstairs. Stiles swallows, nods to Derek’s back, and stares over at the TV again. He fidgets for another few minutes before muttering “Fuck it,” and heading after Derek, taking off his shoes and socks on the way there. 

Upstairs is dark, the shades still closed, and Stiles snaps (as quietly as possible). Two sparks of light appear at the ends of his fingers so that he can watch out for anything on Derek’s floor that he might trip over, tugging off clothes so that by the time he crawls onto the bed behind Derek he’s just wearing his jeans. 

This should be weird. Stiles should be wide awake. Instead, when Derek rolls over and pulls Stiles towards him, lets Stiles tuck himself against Derek, it’s like they haven’t been away from each other for a whole year, and Stiles is out like a light, wrapped up in warmth he hasn’t felt in way too long. 

\---

There’s something nosing at the top of his back, down over his spine, and Stiles groans, trying to roll over. The same something stops him with a hand on his shoulder, holding him down. 

“I know I smell different,” Stiles groans, “but can I roll over?”

“What are these?” Derek asks, and his voice rumbles against Stiles’ back from where his lips are pressed to his spine.

Oh, right, the tattoos. 

“Tattoos,” Stiles sighs. 

“Thanks so much, Captain Obvious.”

“You know, I don’t know why everyone thought you were mute and humorless, because you have enough sarcasm for all of us.”

“What are they, Stiles?”

“Depends on what you mean by that. Either a bronze age weapons kit plus miscellaneous shit, or woad and birch.” 

Derek’s made it down to the circles over his lower back. 

“These are scars,” Derek says, quiet. “Who did this?”

“Someone who I _asked_ to do them. Chill, no one was torturing me or anything so dramatic.” 

Derek finally lets Stiles roll over, although Stiles doesn’t miss the way Derek’s thumb presses into Stiles’ skin over the moon phases, lingering there as he moves. Derek’s hair is still an absolute mess, and the way he’s looking at Stiles is curious and guarded. 

“You feel like witch.”

“Shocking.”

Derek glares then, bends down to kiss the hollow of Stiles’ throat, forcing his head back so that he can drag his teeth over the skin there. 

“It’s Lydia and someone I don’t know.” Derek says against Stiles’ skin, mouths at his throat, and Stiles sucks in a breath, buries a hand in Derek’s hair. “You don’t smell like pack anymore.”

“We weren’t running around with wolves,” Stiles points out. 

“Good,” Derek says, and Stiles rolls his eyes, although he tightens the hand in Derek’s hair when Derek slips his fingertips under Stiles’ waistband. “You’re sleeping with Lydia.”

“Uh, yeah,” Stiles says, swallows. “Also, I feel like if we’re going to have this conversation it should probably include less heavy petting and more talking.”

“Do you know what it was like to wake up to the knowledge that you were _here_ , and outside my door, no less? After not having that for a year?” Derek’s hand goes lower, and Stiles’ eyes flutter closed.

“Ooorrr we could talk later,” Stiles pants, and he knows he’s being totally shameless about the way he’s arching up into Derek’s hand. 

“You belong to yourself. I’m not going to get preachy about what you’re doing with anyone else, or Lydia; she’s tied to you. Talking is secondary to fucking you, at the moment.”

“I am so beyond ok with that,” Stiles gasps, and Derek rumbles out a laugh, licking at Stiles’ throat, a broad stripe up to his ear. When Derek finally wraps a hand around him, the angle awkward because although Stiles’ jeans are loose they’re not quite that loose, Stiles makes some insanely ridiculous keening noise, scrabbling with his heels to try to get further up towards Derek, more into that heat and skin. 

“I’m glad we’re in agreement,” Derek says, and there’s a sharp nip at Stiles’ throat before Derek drifts down Stiles’ body, kissing and biting, unbuttoning his jeans and pulling them down. 

Stiles is pretty sure he comes out of his skin when Derek gets his mouth on him, and he can feel warmth at the base of his spine, sparking upwards and curling around his shoulders, and there is amber light reflected in Derek’s eyes when he looks up at Stiles. 

\---

Allison proves to be a fairly good sparing partner, considering she’s the only other one in their group who’s been training in various weaponry for the last few years. In fact, she’s much better technically, because she’s got a couple of years on Stiles. 

This means that Stiles gets into the habit of fighting dirty. 

“You know,” Allison says mildly as Stiles offers her a hand up from where she’d fallen after he had yanked the loose leaves and dirt out from under her, pulling on the air at the same time he’d taken a swipe at her, “one day I’m just going to knife you while you’re sleeping.”

“That’s kinda sneaky,” Stiles says, and Allison just raises an eyebrow, pointing at the newly formed divot under her feet. “Yes, yes, I know, pot, kettle, etc.”

Allison just grins before she advances on him again, and Stiles barely gets his staff up in time to block her rapid-fire blows, over and over. 

The sound of an engine quitting out on the main road gets both of them to stop, and Allison turns, at the ready, always on alert. 

“It’s Scott,” Stiles says, bent over to catch his breath, his staff braced across his knees. 

“I’m not ever going to get used to you just _knowing_ this stuff.”

“Werewolves feel different, and I can only tell over short distances. It’s like… the air they take up is different.”

“Yeah, but you know it’s Scott.”

“There are only two alphas around here, and the Camaro doesn’t sound like a dying goat.” 

“I have been telling him to get a new car for _years_ , but he refuses to listen. Evidently the stupid little Honda has memories.”

“You totally fucked him in the Honda, didn’t you?”

Allison just gives him a look before Scott comes trampling into the clearing, carrying a couple of take-out bags. 

“Oh my god, you are the most awesome best friend ever, bro,” Stiles says, dropping his staff and going for one of the bags. 

“My army evidently marches on its stomach,” Scott says, grinning as he yanks the bag away from Stiles. “We’re divvying this up equally, or you and I are going to end up eating all of it.” 

They end up sitting on a downed tree, feet kicked out and laughing about something stupid that had happened years ago, when their biggest problems were Peter and Chris. 

“I missed you, dude,” Scott says, elbowing Stiles. Stiles grins at him through a mouth of fries and shoulder bumps him back, making Allison give them both some half-fond, half-exasperated look. “You’re not allowed to go on cool adventures without us again.”

“Deal,” Stiles says, and Scott launches into a story about this owl they’re treating at the wildlife center, and Stiles wraps himself up in the feeling of home.


End file.
